I know basically nothing about the Metal Max series. I know it’s long-running, I believe originally from the Famicom. I believe the only game in the series to have made its way to the West before Xeno (and Xeno Reborn) is Metal Saga on PS2, a game I did not play (it does look pretty interesting). I know they’re these cool RPGs where you build tanks and explore a post-apocalyptic kinda world, but I never played any of them, until now. The only thing I know is that the sequel to Metal Max Xeno Reborn was just cancelled like a week ago, so that’s fun.

So anyways, let’s see what I’ve been missing, and see if this game is good! I hear it’s the worst in the series, so… yeah.

Developer: Kadokawa
Publisher: PQube
Release date: June 10, 2022
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4 (Switch version reviewed)
Genre: Console-style RPG

Review

There is no story in this game, really. You play as a dude with a robot arm that just wakes up in a tunnel somewhere. You find a tank there, escape the tunnel, get recruited into the Iron Base after killing a few giant ants, and then asked to find survivors of the literal apocalypse (since currently the only known people on the planet are 4 guys, so repopulation wouldn’t be possible) and to destroy Catastropus, a giant weapon that wiped out most life on the earth in a few weeks. And that’s about where story stops. There’s conversations you can have with survivors (every “chapter” opens up a few extra lines of dialogue) which gives random useless backstory. There’s endings with some of the characters that are… nothing (I don’t now how to trigger them). The actual ending of the game after killing the final boss? 2 lines of text on a black screen, then the credits. There’s no story. There’s hardly characters. I’m okay with this generally, but I’d like the illusion of a story, at least. This is an RPG, after all.

So in this game you get a party of characters, but each character also drives a tank. Also there’s a cute doggo. There are 2 basic things you do in this game. First is explore the world where you’ll fight enemies and find materials and stuff. Second is being back in the base upgrading your tanks. There’s not much as far as cutscenes and such, generally a few minutes when you meet new characters. So I guess we’ll talk about these 2 “phases” of gameplay.

So the main thing is the exploration/combat. Generally you’ll be driving your selected character’s tank (the other tanks will only appear if battle begins.  You can drive around, if you’re going fast enough (which you may with certain tanks) you can do sweet jumps… which is meaningless and doesn’t lead to anything. Driving is actually pretty funky, as minor bumps in the environment, which is like 98% bumps, can spin you out. And there’s no good gameplay reason for that to happen. You can switch between your 3 tanks… some may drive a bit different, the only gameplay reason to do this is if you’re out of ammo with one tank so you want to attack with another. If you press a button, you pop out an RPG-style menu. This pauses the world while you choose options, may it be weapons or skills to attack targets. Outside of battle, choosing an attack puts you in a first-person view to aim at enemies. You can’t move, and obviously you can only shoot at enemies if they’re within your weapon’s range stat. It’s very wonky. This actually changes if you’re not in your tank, as choosing an attack then actually lets you select a target from a menu, and it only puts targets there that are in range. If an enemy dies from that first attack, combat does not start. Combat does start either if your attack doesn’t kill the targeted enemy, or if the enemy sees you for long enough (a meter appears when an enemy sees you, it fills up slowly, and combat starts when it’s full).

Combat is… not very visually stimulating. It’s technically turn-based, though you can freely move around. You can press B to go in retreat mode, which will let you escape the battle if you get far enough. Weapon range actually stops mattering when in turn-based combat, which makes the stat, overall, kinda dumb. When a turn meter is full, per character, the action stops so you can choose an action. Actions can be attacks (either from your tank, the tank’s skills, the tank driver can get out of the tank to use one of their weapons), items, skills, guard and “out” which properly takes the driver out of the tank. Some weapons (of which you can equip 5 per tank) have limited ammo, while machine guns have unlimited ammo. Some weapons have a range, so the one important part of movement is that you can position yourself so attacks hit multiple enemies. Otherwise movement is meaningless. A tank is not actually destroyed if its HP goes to zero. Rather, this makes its weapons vulnerable. The tank can eventually get disabled if it gets hit enough while at 0 HP, and the driver will automatically come out of the tank at that point and continue combat that way. Meanwhile a human character does get knocked out fully at 0 HP, which makes the human-only dungeons a bit more dangerous. Oh and there’s a doggo that follows you around. You strap a cannon to its back and it helps in battle, sometimes by barking at them which legitimately reduces their stats. The doggo is automatic, basically it serves as an extra target for enemies.

One thing you can do in combat is put auto-attacks on, so the game will still get you to choose an attack on your turn, but following turns it will just keep repeating that action automatically so the action is uninterrupted. This makes some battles very anti-climactic, as you can just select your attacks and just wait for a bit until the win happens. This is a bit tough to do early on (unless you cheat, more on that later… it’s a gameplay element so it’s legitimate to do), but eventually all battles are just you not moving, waiting for the enemy to die. Even the final boss is no challenge as long as your weapons are good enough.

Other than combat, the areas have some items to find (moreso once you buy the metal detector, which should be the first thing you grind money for early), such as materials for upgrades and items for battle, as well as the occasional weapons, engines and tanks. The map notes where they are. There’s boss enemies all over the place, though at first (unless you cheat, which I didn’t) you’ll want to run from them because they’re too strong for a bit. Once you have better equipment, it’s worth wrecking them, as they give some decent money and some materials you can’t get elsewhere (killing cores from all of them, then some unique materials per boss).

In your base there’s a few things you can do. You can talk to the NPCs which is mostly useless. You can talk to the bartender or jukebox if you found booze or records, which is progress for sidequests. Otherwise… there’s the HQ room, there’s no reason to go there except the one part of the story that asks you to go there. There’s a generator room. You can’t go in there. And there’s a computer in front of the tanks which is where you actually do things. That computer allows you to buy stuff for your tanks or party members, sell stuff, upgrade tank pieces, upgrade your tanks kinda and build new tank pieces. Then in your party menu (outside of the computer) you can equip your tanks, equip your characters, and assign skill points which… I’d ignore most of the skills other than the ones that are good for tanks. Building and upgrading tank parts tends to require materials and money.

There’s a few equipment types for tanks. Weapons, engines and chips. Each tank can have 5 weapons, 5 chips and 1 engine. Tanks start with limited slots for chips and weapons, you can unlock more for money. Weapon slots can be set to specific weapon types, so a cannon slot will only allow cannons. Chips have a variety of uses, from powering up certain weapon types, giving access to skills, one of them allows to equip 2 engines… Engines are pretty weird as they determine how much load a tank can take (since weapons have weight). The less of that maximum load you are carrying, the more HP you have. Weird! One thing that I know for sure isn’t explained in the game is interception weapons. I guess they probably stop certain enemy attacks. I have no idea how it works, how it’s activated, any of that. There’s no tutorial text for that, so I just assume it’s a wasted weapon slot. I like setting up a chip that just uses all your weapons in one attack. One of the earliest things I did is set up one of my tanks to have only machine guns, 4 chips that made machine guns stronger and one that gave an skill that launches all machine guns on the tank at once. For a while it would wreck most things in the game. I’d set the other 2 tanks for have a ton of HP and more varied weapons.

Other than equipment, tanks can get upgraded… It’s pretty minimal though, it’s increasing one stat while reducing another, or increasing the other stat while reducing the first one… you can absolutely ignore that element. You can do the same thing for the weapons, in addition to giving them level upgrades which are actually useful.

Humans have a few equipment slots, just take whatever has the best attack/defense. In fact that store sells most of the best stuff for the humans. You spend very little time as humans alone, so you don’t have to really care. There’s literally just one part of the game where it’s fully required to walk around without the tanks for a semi-extended amount of time, because you need to go find a key in the wasteland that opens a door for the tanks to get back to that area. The subdungeons are largely optional, a few have quest items in them or characters to find.

Once you’ve upgraded your tanks, go back to the world back to the world, to whichever fast-travel checkpoint you’ve unlocked. The gameplay loop is exploring until you’re about to die, come back to the base to heal (you can just teleport there of course), upgrade as needed, then go back to explore. The game is linear, basically there’s fairly minor exploration (as the map mostly tells you where all pickups are), but each map just brings to another map (a few have sub-dungeons you have to walk through). Some of them you have to figure out how to get to them, but mostly just… go there. In fact, the final boss is literally right next to the base, there’s a barrier that you can destroy to go fight it whenever you want (though that barrier requires 4000 damage to break). Once you go through all the maps, it does actually bring you to where the final boss is next to the base, so it’s just a circle that goes from the base to the base. Weird.

You can get infinite money. Basically, you can buy engines. Those engines require only money, no materials, to upgrade. So if you have enough money to fully upgrade an engine, you can then sell that fully upgraded engine. This engine (except for the final one in the shop) actually sells for more than what it cost to both buy it and upgrade it fully. So just buy more engines, upgrade them, and sell them. Keep doing that until you have enough money for the next engine, repeat, and so on. Eventually you can just get enough money for whatever you want, without actually playing the game. Good job devs. I never realized that until I didn’t need money anymore, but hey, it’s there. The shop doesn’t start with everything, but once you get to the library and do a quest in there, I think that’s the only time the shop updates. If I had realized this cheat early, it would’ve made things way easier and the game way shorter.

Basically, once you have a ton of money, you can kinda just… wreck everything and finish the game. Kinda. Some of the good weapons need to be found or built. You do unlock more difficulties if you beat the game, which I don’t think is New Game+. You can also reload your save, which… it brings back all the items you can pick up in the map, and you can refight the final boss I guess. I don’t know why you’d do that, I didn’t explore much of that.

Oh, and there’s like 10 tanks to find or whatever, but I don’t know why you’d ever use any other than, like, the first 3 you get. I didn’t. I didn’t use any of the other characters I found either other than switching the drunk doomer dude for Maria… Not for any gameplay reason, of course.

I didn’t touch on the Switch port job… it’s not good, loading anything takes like at least a minute, it’s bad. And the graphics are pure jag.

Overall

After I finished this, I went and looked at videos of Metal Max Xeno, the not-Reborn version… wow. Huge difference. The graphics are nicer, the combat is a more standard turn-based system, and, from the little I’ve seen, there’s actually a story, or at least something resembling an ending. I don’t know if it’s better… but it might be. I’m pretty curious what the intention was behind changing everything. Seems to me they had a pretty acceptable game in the first place, why wasn’t this just a Switch/PC port?

While I think there’s a lot to like about Metal Max Xeno Reborn, especially the heavy gameplay focus, there’s a lot of questionable design decisions. The complete lack of story (and obvious censorship as some drawings were removed from the original version) and pretty weird problems in the overall gameplay structure do very much hold it back. The auto-battle which becomes worse as you progress, some of the elements being a bit under-developed….  I dunno, it’s lacking.

Still makes me curious about the rest of the Metal Max series, considering so few have come out in the West, especially since I hear this is actually the worst in the series. I do think it’s pretty redeemable, so if it’s the worst, I’m sure gotta be some pretty good ones.

You know, I complain about remasters and collections a bit, but this is the kind of series that would totally benefit from such a collection, since it has a lot of games that only made it to a limited audience (japan-only), so a collection of the classic games would bring it in the eyes of a whole new set of people. It’s why I pushed for the SaGa collection as a great one, while something like Last of Us remasters are beyond fucking stupid. Make a Metal Max collection please, Kadokawa!

I won’t give this a recommendation. I think it’s a bit rough. And I guess the future of Metal Max is iffy considering the sequel to Metal Max Xeno Reborn was just recently cancelled.